Hemp diapers stand-out as the newest and most promising among recent nappy innovations, but by no means do they stand single. Newcomers to the amazing world of high-tech, earth-friendly diapers and two-layer “diaper systems” encounter choices and options that stagger the imagination. These are not the nappies your mama slapped on your behind. These are not the big, clumsy cloth squares you slapped on your older children’s bottoms. Twenty-first century diapers challenge earth-friendly manufacturers’ design skills, knowledge of biochemistry and chemical processes, and encyclopedic command of worldwide timber products and markets. When your baby arrives on-scene, he or she will drive some seriously high-tech trousers.
According to experts, 2009 stands out as a vintage year for diapers. At least a dozen innovations hit the market, and almost all of them hit the mark. Imagine everything a parent could wish, want, and need in a diaper. Imagine those desires fulfilled at a reasonable price. Imagine all of those reasonably priced, almost magical innovations arriving at your door because you took five minutes to make a few keystrokes and enter a few digits. Now, stop imagining and begin accepting that, yes, in 2009 diaper innovators turned your visions to realities.
Hemp diapers, however, probably did not number among your visions. Hemp diapers? Really? If a pollster asked you to name the first twenty things that come to mind when he says “hemp,” would diapers even make the list? At first glance, the whole idea seems like a super-annulated hippie’s somewhat dazed and confused notion of back-to-nature baby care. But intelligent, sophisticated, perfectly sober parents are finding the wisdom of using hemp cloth diapers.
Until very recently, all cloth diapers were made of cotton-nothing special, just cotton. Relatively inexpensive to produce and easy to process, cotton cost manufacturers and consumers very little, but it exacted a heavy toll from Mother Earth. No cash crop requires more chemical fertilizers and dangerous chemical pesticides than cotton, and no cash crop has been solely responsible for more ecological disasters. Hemp costs even less than cotton, and it grows easily without damaging or depleting fertile soil. More durable than cotton and at least as absorbent, hemp requires some oxidation to turn the bright white consumers cherish in diapers; but sophisticated manufacturers have found effective chlorine-free bleach alternatives.
Hemp diapers, at first considered a throw-back to Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock, emerge as one of the twenty-first century’s cutting edge products.
Ashley J Michaels is an home economist. For more excellent information on Hemp Diapers please visit http://reusablediapers.us/
By: Ashley J Michaels












